


The Defence of Hogwarts

by RogueBelle



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Hogwarts, Hogwarts Founders Era, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 16:56:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RogueBelle/pseuds/RogueBelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of tragedy, Rowena realises that the school will always have a need to defend itself -- but her actions perplex and trouble her friend Helga.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Defence of Hogwarts

“Ah... Magistra?”

“Yes, Alaric, what is it?”

“Uhm.” The boy, an older student, was not much given to mumbling nor to hesitation, and so Helga frowned as she approached him. He was looking over the crenellation, down at the grounds which stood between the Great Hall and the outer gates. “It’s Magistra Ravenclaw, madam. She’s… well…”

Helga joined him at the edge of the wall and looked over. Down in the courtyard below, Rowena stood in a circle of what looked like every statute from inside the castle. “Oh dear,” Helga murmured. “Alaric, take over the instruction for me. I’ll be back momentarily.” She touched his shoulder lightly. “And do try to keep anyone else from staring.”

As she hustled down the winding staircase, then through the corridors that led to the front of the school, it was with trepidation that Helga wondered what her friend was up to now, what eccentricity had grasped her. Gnawing her lip anxiously, Helga trotted out into the courtyard, and as she did, she could see better the ornaments which had sprung to life, from tiny carvings of mice and birds leapt off of their columns and colonnades, up to the massive beasts who typically stood at the entrances and exits. Sandstone, granite, and marble, they stood in orderly ranks around the raven-haired witch in her soft, grey robes.

There were other figures, too, more curious -- greaves, cuirasses, helms, and gauntlets, standing on their own, with no bodies to fill them. They were a mismatched lot, collected from heavens only knew where, everything from an ancient centurion’s kit to the rounded armor of the Scandinavians to the pointed helmets and long chainmail tunics favoured by the Normans. They hovered above the ground at the height of a man, for all the world as though invisible soldiers stood inside them.

Odder still, Rowena appeared to be talking to them, statues and ghostly soldiers alike. She moved slowly from one to the next, making adjustments to the armor-people here and there, running her hands over the animals’ heads and shoulders. Worse, she was nodding, as though in understanding of some confidence imparted to her.

After a moment, Helga could not contain her curiosity. “Rowena?” Helga ventured, most tentatively. Everyone had been tentative with Rowena lately. Her beauty was somewhat dimmed of late, the pallor of her skin turned sickly rather than moon-lustrous, and the air of haughtiness had morphed into a touch-me-not brittleness of such severity that almost none of the students were eager to make eye contact with her. Even Helga and Godric were finding it difficult to catch her attention. “Rowena, my dear... What are you doing?”

“Teaching.” 

Helga blinked, wondering if Rowena had finally done what she’d been worried about and cracked entirely. She had spent so much time lately gazing into the mists, had burnt so much of that damned Artemesia, her mind wandering farther and farther afield. It was an inherent danger in all prophetesses, but one that Rowena had, till now, kept at bay: the danger of unmooring and setting oneself temporally adrift. Yet these past few months, Rowena insisted on tempting fate, over and over again, in diligent pursuit of some unshared quarry. Whatever she was searching for, what terrified Helga was the too-tangible possibility that one day she might not come back.

“I am teaching them,” Rowena said, quite slowly, as though drawing the words from a long ways off, “certain measures of… defence.” She was looking in the direction a pard carved from reddish stone, but her eyes were focused elsewhere. “I am teaching them what to do, should a master or mistress of this school ever call upon them. Who to block the doors. Who to look to the skies. Who to see to matters below-grounds.” A muscle in her cheek, near the corner of her mouth, twitched slightly. “Who should charge forth, and who remain behind, to protect the students.”

As Helga looked about at the motley collection, Helga found herself wondering which of these insensible guardians had been given which tasks. “But... Rowena, dear... why?”

Rowena did not answer for a moment. She took great interest in adjusting the buckle on the centurion’s cuirass, for all the world as though there were a body inside it which needed greater comfort. Then she stepped back, sighed, and quite abruptly looked Helga in the eye. “Because there will be a need, someday,” she said, low and mournful. “Because this castle will have enemies through the ages, and I do not know that the numbers of witches and wizards here will be enough to defend her. Because--” She broke off suddenly, snapping her head to the side. 

Helga followed her gaze out over the lake. A thestral was coming down to roost on the island that jutted up from the center, a long ways out. Both women watched it descend, a stark black silhouette against the white winter sky, sinking into the whorl of evergreens.

“Because he might come back, Helga,” Rowena said. “And if he does...” Her voice trailed off. Her expression did not change, but Helga could read in her eyes a world of pain. Godric had scars on his arms which he would bear to his grave, but whatever Salazar had done to Rowena had struck far deeper, for all that the wounds were invisible.

“If he does,” Helga picked up, “we shall need to be ready.”

Rowena nodded. “I don’t want to believe it, but... I would not put it past him to gather like-minded wizards and take up wands against us. There are still many in these isles who disagree with what we’re doing here, in the general or the particulars. And even if he doesn’t...” Her shoulders moved with the effort of another sigh, and this time she cast her eyes up towards the castle. “There will be others like him.”

Helga scuffed at the dirt with her toe, a childhood habit never fully abandoned. “We dream such dreams, you know,” she said, “of harmony and such. Of bringing all wizards together under one banner, for the common good. It’s so distressing, to think that... that it isn’t even just him, that there are others out there, and will be for years to come...” She wondered, not for the first time, if this was the blow Godric had not yet recovered from, the fracturing of his idealistic certainty, the shattering of his optimism -- but she could think of no good that would come in voicing that particular concern to Rowena. “I suppose... well, it was foolish of me to hope, I know, but I still suppose I was imagining that what we do here might put an end to that sort of strife.”

“It may yet.” Rowena did not sound particularly sanguine about the possibility, more as though she were admitting the validity of a hypothesis. “I intend that this castle should live for many, many times our lifespans,” Rowena said, in the haunted sort of voice that she often used when waking out of a trance. “I don’t always understand what I see that it will be, centuries and centuries from now, but I know that it will stand, for it must. For as long as there are witches and wizards on this isle, on this earth... this castle shall be a haven. But it will not always be the same.” Something flitted across her face, and then she half-turned towards Helga, smiling suddenly with childlike delight. “Did you know, Helga, that someday, just a few hundred years from now, there will be a way of keeping plants alive all through the winter in a sort of outdoor house?”

Helga laughed lightly. “I should like to see that.”

“You can thank the Italians for it. Eventually. And the water will run under the floors and through the walls, like the Roman hypocausts of old, but so much more extensive. It will be carried right up to the top of the highest tower.” She looked up at the castle, breathing deeply. “Like blood in its veins.”

It had always unnerved Helga a bit, the way Rowena sometimes spoke of the castle as a living being. She spoke of leaving it room to grow, like a child, though its lifespan would be measured in millennia, not decades. She had once made Helga teach her a wide variety of healing spells, and then set them to work on mortar and stone rather than flesh and blood. The castle could recover from damage now; Helga had seen that when one of her students had accidentally left a potion brewing too long, leading to a rather impressive explosion which had taken out part of a wall. It took longer than it took a human to heal -- the cauldron incident had been nearly a decade earlier, and there was still a faint black scorch in the place -- but heal it did, and that was thanks to Rowena’s clever manipulations. It had seemed so important to her, that Hogwarts be able to look after itself in that way. All four of them had put themselves into this building, but Rowena seemed to take greater responsibility than any of them for its very marrow.

“It will learn,” Rowena said, her voice far away again. “I know that now. What it has to adapt to, it will learn to do so. It will enhance itself with the changes of the centuries, like putting on a new-fashioned gown, and thus never find itself obsolete.” And there it was, a hint of the old moon-glow on her cheeks, a not-quite-smile of pride. Before Helga could speak again, Rowena swept briskly away from her. The grey eyes, suddenly sharp, looked piercingly at the surrounding minions of stone and shields. “You will defend this castle when called upon.”

“We will.” They answered in a hundred different voices, some as gravelly as their making, some piping whispers, some thrummingly resonant.

“And when the time comes,” Rowena went on, “you will teach your fellows. New statues, new suits of armour, when they join your ranks.”

“We will.”

“You will obey the directions given to you by he or she designated castellan, he or she with the authority to command.”

“We will.”

“You will do this,” Rowena said, “despite the danger to yourselves. You will defend this castle, your home and home to so many others, whatever the cost.” Helga thought she heard a slight quaver in Rowena’s voice this time, and perhaps with good reason: a creature given life and movement could start to have a sense of itself -- and with that, perhaps, a sense of self-preservation.

“Magistra.” This time, it was only one statue that spoke: an enormous carving of a pegasus, whose voice rumbled like the depths of the ocean. “Should the enemy blast us to bits, our pebbles will rise from the ground to pelt the offenders’ eyes. Such is our devotion.”

“You are our mother,” said another statute. Helga’s head whipped towards it, an angel with clasped hands and a voice as light as a breeze; Rowena remained perfectly still.

“You made us.” An enormous boar, taller than Helga, his back thatched with moss.

“You gave us life.” The empty, echoing armour of a Danish thane.

“You gave us a purpose.” A Healer-Saint with a book clasped to her chest.

“And we shall do your bidding--” The pegasus, who had spoken first.

“Until the last star burns out of the heavens.” A centaur, who looked full ready to spend his quiver full of arrows at the slightest provocation.

Rowena gazed for a long moment at something beyond them all, and then she bowed her head, grateful and humble. “I thank you.” There were tears, shining pearlescent and clinging to her eyelashes. “And now I give you the words which will summon you at need. It will be for the castellan to speak them, to call you to arms.” Rowena raised her wand, such an elegant and deceptively thin bit of hazel, and it seemed to Helga that all of the statues stood a little straighter. “ _Piertotum Locomotor_.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this work, please check out [my blog](http://cassmorriswrites.com)! I also write original fiction, and my debut novel will be out January 2018.


End file.
